Thomas J Parlette
“Humming in the Darkness”
Isaiah 11:1-10, Romans 15: 4, 12-13
12/8/19
The other day I stopped in at Barnes and Nobles Bookstore in the Mall. Online shopping is great when you know exactly what you want. But sometimes I’m in the mood to browse and discover something I didn’t know I needed.
So I was in the religious section, thumbing through a copy of Max Lucado’s latest book and I noticed that you can buy a separate Old Testament and New Testament version of The Message, a paraphrase of the Bible in modern language from Eugene Peterson that I really like. So just out curiosity, I picked up a copy of the Old Testament Message and started comparing it to one of the complete Bible versions. You know, I thought maybe they were offering more maps or commentary or study helps in the separated versions – you never know. And I’m always on the lookout for interesting new resources.
As I was looking over the Old Testament version, a younger looking lady walked up beside me and started looking at Bible translations as well. She looked over at what I was looking at and saw that it was an Old Testament only volume, and then said, I suppose to me, “I think I like the New Testament God better.”
I can understand that. A lot of people feel that way. A lot of people have trouble reading the Hebrew scriptures that we call the Old Testament. It’s easy to come away from the first part of our Bible with a picture of a vengeful, angry, vindictive God who seems to like sending plagues and killing prophets of other religions and drowning Egyptians in the sea. The Old Testament does have its share of violence, harsh words of warning and yes, even judgment. It’s much easier, much more comfortable to pick up a copy of just the New Testament and stroll through the countryside of Galilee, listening to the stories told by the kind and compassionate Son of God. Lots of people prefer the New Testament God.
But in the midst of the doom and gloom that seems to dominate the Old Testament, we come across a gem like this one in Isaiah – “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse and a branch shall grow out of his roots…”
Isaiah wrote this poem of hope to an Israelite nation that had been beaten by the Babylonians and humiliated by the Assyrians. They were a people who had been cut down. They were a stump, a once great society cut down to nothing – or almost nothing.
“But don’t give up hope,” says Isaiah, “something is coming. Something is going to grow from this stump - a shoot will sprout that will one day become the root of Jesse and the Kingdom will be restored.” Isaiah isn’t talking doom and glow – he is talking hope and encouragement. Keep your chin up! God has not forgotten us. God will keep his promise. Rejoice! Praise the Lord! The root of Jesse shall come. Hold fast to hope.
For we cannot live without hope. Once we give up hope, we’re finished. Dostoyevsky, the famous Russian novelist once said, “To live without hope is to cease to live.” He was right. When we stop hoping – we stop living.
Victor Frankl was a lucky man. He survived a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. He was one of the lucky ones. Or maybe it was something more than luck.
In his book, From Death Camp to Existentialism, Frankl notes the desperate need that all human beings have for hope. In the camp, hope grew especially strong in the days leading up to Christmas. Every prisoner dreamed of going home. They could endure the physical abuse, the back breaking work, the lack of food, the freezing cold – as long as they could look forward to the day that they would be rescued and go home for Christmas.
But then Christmas came and went with no rescue. A few prisoners took their own lives. Then a few more. And still more. Some people just stopped getting out of bed. They stopped eating. They stopped caring. And one morning they just didn’t wake up. It was as if they had willed themselves to slip away.
Six months later, when Allied soldiers took over Frankl’s camp and liberated the prisoners, they found that almost half of the prison population had died since Christmas. They could not live without hope. As Langston Hughes has written, “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.” We cannot live without hope.
That’s why Paul wrote what he did to the church in Rome. They were in a tight spot, being persecuted and harassed for their beliefs in the capital city of the world at that time. They needed a word of hope to get them through. They needed some encouragement, so assurance that there was a brighter day coming. So Paul goes back to Isaiah: “Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope.” Remember what Isaiah said – the root of Jesse shall come. It’s not all doom and gloom. There is Hope and Encouragement in the Old Testament too.
And to have hope is to have life. Willem Brandt was also a lucky man during World War II. He was one of the thousands of Dutch citizens that were also imprisoned in concentration camps. One of Brandt’s friends had a candle made of wax and animal fat, which he guarded with care. Among the starving men, the consumption of just a little fat, even from a candle, could mean the difference between life and death. Each night this man would nibble off a small chunk of candle in secret, and he would share a few bits with his friend Brandt, as long as he didn’t tell the other prisoners.
One morning, one of the other prisoners announced, “Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.”
And someone said, “Next year, we will be home for Christmas.”
Another prisoner, lost in happier memories whispered, “At Christmas time candles burn and bells ring.”
All the other men nodded, savoring their own memories of Christmas.
That little episode touched off a change in Brandt’s friend. He snuck out that night and came back to the bunkhouse with a burning ember from the fire pit. He set his treasured candle and carefully lit the wick. All the other men slowly gathered around the flickering, half-eaten candle. The light reflected off their bony shoulders and sunken cheeks, but their eyes were filled with soft light.
Some said, “It’s Christmas. The light shines in the darkness.”
And another voice finished the thought, “And the darkness cannot overcome it.” Hope continued to flicker.
The following year, those prisoners were home for Christmas. And every Christmas since, those who survived remembered the gift of light shining even in the darkest places.
The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once wrote that “In all things it is better to hope than to despair.”
Vaclav Havel, the former President of Czechoslovakia once said that “hope is definitely not the same as optimism. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
And Henri Nouwen explains that “hope means to keep living amid desperation and to keep humming in the darkness. Hope is knowing that there is love, it is trust in tomorrow, it is falling asleep and waking again when the sun rises.”
And that is what we do in this season of Advent. We keep humming in the darkness, waiting for the light of the world to conquer the darkness.
We keep humming in the darkness, trusting that we will rise again to a better day – a day when the Lord will rule with a spirit of wisdom, understanding, counsel and might.
We keep humming in the darkness until that day when the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.
We keep humming in the darkness, secure in the knowledge that the root of Jesse shall come, the root of Jesse shall come.
So let us gather together at the Lord’s table and nourished for the wait.
May God be praised. Amen.
